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In this series, Amateur Egghead, I examine a range of different subjects on which I have no formal education or expertise of any kind. The opinions and thoughts within are my own and will likely piss a bunch of people off, mostly the ones who benefit from the things I talk about. -Ed.

It's difficult to start this without getting directly to the point; why is psychology still a science when the only thing we're learning about the human mind is all about the mechanics of the brain? The brain is the medium in which the "mind" resides, but it is not the mind itself without the person attached to it and the experiences that person has had. Science, as defined by Oxford, is:

"the intellectual and practical activity
encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the
physical and natural world through observation and experiment..."

The world, as we know it, is already astonishingly complex, so much so that we don't know more than a fraction of what constitutes knowledge, and we've been hammering away at this ever since we became sentient. Hell, we don't even really know when that happened (though there are some really good guesses out there). Our universe, that which we can perceive and surmise from observation, is immensely enormous and, from our perspective, has no end. How do we even fathom that concept?

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“It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money.... Let me give you a tip on men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the...bell of an approaching looter.” -Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was special, and not in a good way. She was a caustic, belligerent herald of the apocalypse that is raw, uncontrolled capitalism. And yet, Rand was simply a product of her time. [Keep in mind that this is not supposed to be an exhaustive analysis of the rise of Randian concepts, but just a loose overview of some of the things that led to the development of her ideas, so don’t troll me for being somewhat inaccurate, nerds. -TC]

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We should come to grips with the idea as soon as possible. We are, after all, heading for a rather dramatic shift in human thinking. We need to figure out how we humans are going to formulate our societies as soon as we have self-driving vehicles of all stripes, artificial intelligence running everything, smart grids that deliver all manner of clean energy, and robots that deal with all manner of work. We will be living in a version of the dystopian we’ve all seen in movies, but it won’t be quite so dystopian.

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Welcome to the brave new world of DESIGN OVER FUNCTION that JonnyJohnnee Jony Ive guy has crafted at Post Jobs Apple where a glass sandwich costs you $1,000 and you must pay for the privilege of using your purchased media in their walled garden. During Apple's unveiling of "One more thing" in the shiny new Steve Jobs Theater on the shiny new Cupertino campus, Craig Federighi tried to use Face ID to unlock the demo phone. It didn't work. Today in The Guardian, there's a convenient PR piece explaining why.